Garbed in a sequence of paradigmatic structures such as the joke, the notebook, the novel and the script, this issue’s range of contributions defy the innate obsolescence of classification through their embrace of poetic analysis. Drawing theme and method from a new translation of Roland Barthes’ notes for a lecture course The Preparation of the Novel, which starts ‘...as if I was going to write one’, What Am I? is not quite what it looks, but we’ve decided to publish anyway.